Sándor (Alexander) Hammer emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1938 and married Jeanette Kasser of Trenton, New Jersey. He left behind his mother Eugenia (Jenny), father Samu (Samuel), sister Margit, her husband Gyula Kürschner, and their young son also named Sándor.
The Kürschners were both physicians who practiced in the small village of Tab in central Hungary. Although subject to anti-Semitic laws under a Fascist Hungarian regime, the Hammers and Kürschners were generally unmolestindent1ed until April 1944 when Nazi deportations began.
Sometime between May and November of 1944, Margit and her 7-year-old boy Sándor were deported to Auschwitz. Gyula was forced to work at a typhus hospital and died there of the disease. Samuel was shot by the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazis) on the banks of the Danube and his body pushed into the river.
Jenny survived to the end of the war in the Budapest Ghetto and lived out her life in the United States, passing away in 1960.